Zorachus99
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Joined: 9/15/2000
From: Palo Alto, CA
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The battle of Stalingrad, Excerpted for MWIF, regarding option 47.
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The German high command had realized by the Spring of 1942, that Operation Barbarossa had not made the Russians surrender as easily as the French. The despots on both sides of Russian Steppes had locked horns, and both had been gravely damaged.
Germany set it’s direction south in 1942, operations destined to be oil in the Caucuses.
“If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny then I must finish this war.”
—Adolf Hitler
A bold offensive was launched, literally petering out on the face of the caucuses with a propaganda operation done with German mountaineers.
However, the Soviets were building up forces near Stalingrad, and Hitler was becoming obsessed in the day-to-day operations of capturing Stalingrad. So obsessed was Hitler, in fact, that Stalin knew exactly what to do in the oncoming winter.
After long bitter fighting, Germans had forced themselves between the Don and the Volga River into Stalingrad, and had the Romanian 3rd Army manning a front in the north along the Don River on the left flank, while the Romanian 4th Army covered the south on the right flank of Stalingrad.
The attack with 18 Russian infantry divisions and 6 armor brigades smashed the Axis defenders in the north and south, encircling the Germans in 2 days, by the 20th of Nov 1942.
Suddenly over a quarter million Axis troops were surrounded. Russians rushed to reinforce the newly occupied ground.
Immediately food, ammunition, and basic supplies were at a standstill. The very maximum amount of tonnage the air fleet was capable of was some 100 tons of daily airlift, but the troops easily needed 750 tons daily.
Troops began starving nearly immediately. Promises by Goering to provide supplies to the city resulted with over 500 transport aircraft damaged or destroyed beyond repair, and heavy losses to trained crews as well.
Manstein launched Operation Winter Storm to break through to Stalingrad, but failed some 40km from the occupied forces.
NOW TO MWIF
Thankfully, knowing the rules, Jan 1st came. All of the units surrounded, disrupted get their bi-monthly ration of supplies. All the surrounded non-oil dependent units become perfectly reorganized. Bullets are shipped in; men get all the food they need to fight like men again, and even better, some supply from ATR does get though, which is used to reorganize oil dependent armor units.
YaY! Now that all your units are face up, and its winter, nobody will attack you. The defensive effects are too serious for the Russians to do more than attrition with a bunch of poor odds attacks perhaps. At the very least those Russians will have to get extremely lucky to flip and re-attack all of your units in the bad weather. Who cares if one of your two ATR’s got shot down along with its pilot resupplying the armor units?
BACK TO REAL LIFE
Jan 1st came. The Germans were not only starving, but running out of ammunition and the necessities of war.
Vicious combat ensued before a quarter-million man army was completely removed from the Axis arsenal on February 1st.
The loss was a result of smart tactical doctrine by the Russians, and the simple fact that no army isolated from every source of supply has very long to live. Food, bullets, and fuel are simple facts that cannot be dreamt away.
SUMMARY
Clearly those units in the Stalingrad pocket were disrupted. The very description of the situation is similar to the description of what a disrupted unit is. In addition the description also seems to model disrupted and out of supply units. In WIF, out of supply, disrupted units are the *very best* units to attack. They are nearly worthless defensively and cannot move. If you have OOS and disrupted units to attack on the board, you are doing an extremely good job of being a general in WIF. Obviously a quarter million men were cleared from the board in less than 40 days. That is a LOT of units.
So, what’s the problem? In MWIF currently, surrounded units get reorganized. If fact, opponents will simply assume it is part of the game, and a numerous number of scurrilous and unrealistic moves have been opened up to exploit; simply because non-oil dependent units always reorganize. Chasing a non-supply dependent unit can sound challenging, but, is that realistic? I would ask you to consider how many ways you can exploit this rule, before brushing it away as trivial.
How option 47 or whatever became an optional rule is amazing by itself.
How hard could this be to fix? I don't know.
My understanding is that this rule is restricted solely to the end of turn, during the reorganization phase.
This phase only happens once a turn. I certainly wouldn’t mind a longish calculation if it is only once a turn. Throw up a screen that says ‘calculating’ or something even.
This phase does not require that supply be traced normally either. However, it can be complicated by overseas supply. But in the name of all that holy, can’t we have some limited form of it on a temporary basis that only traces a few hexes?
Now I understand that there are a lot of things to fix, but I would certainly like this to get onto the roadmap.
This is an important supply thing.
Please excuse the blurt of words, if incomprehensible, my apologies in hindsight.
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Most men can survive adversity, the true test of a man's character is power. -Abraham Lincoln
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RE: Option 47 - 
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